ENTRY TYPE
General |
SUMMARY
A student of the history of the Jewish community of Istanbul will usually obtain a picture of this community based on a contemporary perspective. By and large, it will be a history of a Sephardic community that has undergone a lengthy process of Ottoman Turkish and oriental acculturation. This paper will try to offer, albeit in a nutshell, a view of Istanbul Jewry in the Ottoman period from a Romaniot perspective, based on a variety of sources. The Romaniots were descendants of the Byzantine Greek-speaking Jews dwelling in the Ottoman Empire, who, in the course of some three hundred years since the settlement of Iberian Jews in Istanbul (1492-1560), were assimilated by the newcomers from Spain and Portugal. |
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